Glistening sky-smitten sea
curtseying supplicant to He
who gave us land to walk on –
we walked we walked so far
and long that we forgot
her siren song – how she
had carved us from salt light
and might reclaim her selkie one –
the land the land we walk upon
it shudders and lets go
each footprint in the sand as
we return to rock and foam.
© Kate Ashton
Picture 10017042, illustration by Warwick Goble, 1909, image copyright Mary Evans
Kate Ashton was born in Beith and trained as a nurse at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh in the late sixties. Her writing career began in London as a news reporter and later features editor on Nursing Times in the seventies, and she went on to write hospital-based fiction published all over the world. She lived in the Netherlands for nearly 25 years, working as a freelance editor and writing non-fiction books. She returned to live in the Highlands in 2003 and has since written several works of narrative non-fiction, as well as translating from Dutch and Frisian. Her poems and reviews have appeared in UK magazines and webzines including THE SHOp, Envoi, Glasgow Review of Books, Agenda, Shearsman, Shadowtrain, Causeway, Molly Bloom, londongrip.com and Long Poem Magazine. A pamphlet, The Concourse of Virgins, was published by Lapwing in 2012, and her first full collection, Who by Water, came out from Shearsman Books in 2016. She has recently completed a second collection.
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